Miriam Carey was the 34-year-old Stamford resident shot and killed after a car chase in Washington on Oct. 3. A lawyer for her family said Ms. Carey was an innocent victim, and says a police report released Friday proves it. Ms. Carey, who lived in Stamford, was unarmed and sitting inside her car with her young daughter when Secret Service agents and Capitol police fired on the vehicle, killing her, said the lawyer, Eric Sanders.

Mr. Sanders and family members have asked for a complete and transparent investigation into the shooting, under the circumstances a reasonable request. Family members, who will gather for her funeral today in Brooklyn, N.Y., deserve answers.

The Metropolitan Police Department report said that Carey led police on a chase through the nation's capital, driving "erratically," and was shot while inside her car after refusing to stop for officers on Maryland Avenue near the U.S. Capitol building. The child was not injured.

Ms. Carey refused to stop at a vehicle checkpoint near the White House, and instead turned the car around and began to flee the area, the police report states. An officer with the U.S. Secret Service attempted to block the vehicle with a bicycle rack, but Ms. Carey drove into the rack, knocking the officer to the ground.

She soon drove onto a curb on Maryland Avenue SW, the report states. Though officers surrounded the vehicle, she reversed direction, striking a Secret Service vehicle. Officers shot at her but she drove away. Soon she drove over a median, reversed direction again, and again refused to stop, according to the report. At this point, officers fired "several" shots into the vehicle, striking and killing Ms. Carey, the report states.

Was she a potential assassin or a confused, frightened person suffering from mental illness trying to get herself out of danger? Are police trained to know the difference?

The incident demands a thorough investigation. Police were responding in the heat of the moment to an apparent rush at the White House. But Professor James Mulvaney of John Jay College in New York, writing in The Washington Post, said if officers had been trained to recognize the symptoms of mental illness, they might have "figured out a way to calm her down without killing her."

Since the criminal justice system is the default treatment program for many with mental illness, such training is advisable.